Open letter to President Ollanta Humala

Since Jan. 26, the inbox of Andean Air Mail & PERUVIAN TIMES has been inundated with an open letter addressed to President Ollanta Humala, signed by people from all corners of the globe.

As of today, the number of these appeals generated by the The Rainforest Portal and copied to our news blog’s email address surpassed 1,660.

Below is the content of their message:

“Please cancel plans for road through Alto Purus and save uncontacted tribes and their rainforest habitats” Read more…

UPDATE: Peruvian Times Reader’s appeal to Google News / Mission Accomplished!

A big thank you is in order to the faithful readers of Andean Air Mail & PERUVIAN TIMES. Thanks in large measure to your efforts, our articles are once again being indexed by Google News.

“source-suggestions@google.com
Great news! This message is to confirm that we’ve
reviewed and added your site to Google News. The inclusion of your
articles should be processed within the next few days. Please retain this
message and refer to it should you have any issues with your site in
Google News.

Google News Information
————————-

Site name: Andean Airmail & PERUVIAN TIMES
Site location: Lima, Peru”

A little Peruvian girl with a damaged heart gets help

UPDATE: EsSalud, the national health care network of Peru, has reportedly made a last-minute decision to assume the remaining cost for 5-year-old Valeria Vásquez‘s heart transplant.

According to an email newsletter sent out by her school, Jean Piaget, Valeria is being flown tonight with her father, Diego, aboard a charter ambulance plane on a 10-hour journey to the university hospital in Minnesota.

Donations are no less important, however, since her treatment is expected to last at least six months to a year, and her family needs all the financial help it can get to cover travel and living expenses during her care. The first procedure will be to hook her up to an artificial heart to help stabilize her other organs. Then she must wait for a compatible donor heart.

By Rick Vecchio
Peruvian Times Editor

Only a heart transplant can save five-year-old Valeria Vásquez. Her parents, Diego and Jesicca, need to raise more than US$550,000 for her to receive the operation in the United States.

Their story aired last weekend on the Sunday night TV news magazine Panorama.

Peruvians responded with an outpouring of donations: More than US$200,000 in Peru and nearly US$24,000 in the United States.

But anticipated transplant-related expenses are expected to total US$775,000 — the sum Diego and Jesicca must raise before they can travel with Valeria to the University of Minnesota Amplatz Children’s Hospital.

Full disclosure: I have known Valeria since she was toddler. She has been my little girl’s best friend since they were both two years old. She is a smart, vivacious, graceful, funny little girl.

It was last November on a Friday that Valeria first showed signs of illness. She developed a high fever and had trouble breathing; Her body ached and she was nauseous — all symptoms easily chalked up to a common flu. But by Sunday, her parents, both physicians, knew something much more serious had afflicted their daughter. They checked her into the hospital.

The initial diagnosis was a virus, probably long dormant, in her heart. For days she remained in pediatric intensive care, and pulled through. She was able to attend graduation at her pre-school in December, and go on a few play dates with her friends. But her condition did not improve. It got worse.

Then came the devastating news: The virus had caused permanent damage to her heart, a condition known as dilated cardiomyopathy, in which the heart becomes weakened and enlarged and cannot pump blood efficiently.

Diego and Jesicca are desperately hoping to raise the money before Valeria’s decreased heart function damages her liver,  lungs and other body systems.

If you want to help them, you can make your donation to:

In Peru:
Banco Interbank (In the name of Valeria’s uncle, Bruno Vásquez de Bracamonte)
En soles: 288-3038206265 (cuenta interbancaria 003-288-013038206265-86)
En dólares: 288-3038206299 (cuenta interbancaria 003-288-013038206299-85)

Or online, with a credit card, through the the Children’s Organ Transplant Association (COTA) :
http://cota.donorpages.com/PatientOnlineDonation/COTAforValeriaV/

 

El Comercio gets huge cache of Wikileaked cables about Peru

Peru’s leading daily newspaper, El Comercio, announced in its Sunday edition that it has received more than 4,000 U.S. State Department diplomatic cables from Wikileaks.

The newspaper revealed two of the cables on Sunday.   The first covers a conversation in 2006 just after the presidential elections, when APRA Congressman and co-secretary general Jorge del Castillo requested the help of the U.S. Embassy to convince PPC candidate Lourdes Flores to accept her defeat against Alan Garcia (a difference of a little under 70,000 votes) and join forces with APRA to defeat the nationalist candidate, Ollanta Humala, in the second election round, in exchange for a working relationship or co-participation in the Garcia administration.

The second cable, dated March 2008, reports on the work by Hugo Chavez in Venezuela to help Ollanta Humala and other radical groups to organize an anti-summit in Lima for May that year, at the same time as the Latin America Caribbean and European Union Summit, EU-LAC, to which 60 heads of State and Government arrived. Thousands gathered for the anti-summit but in the end the only head of state present was Evo Morales of Bolivia.  President Chavez was in Lima for the EU-LAC summit but did not attend the anti-summit.

In a full-page article, El Comercio Editor Rossana Echeandía told the intriguing story of the initial phone call she received on Jan. 22 from an anonymous intermediary, asking if she would mind being contacted by a foreign journalist to discuss an important matter. Read more…

Van der Sloot: Peruvian justice, public passion and the media’s responsibility

By Rick Vecchio
Peruvian Times Editor

The absence of one word left a gaping hole in our story yesterday about Joran Van der Sloot’s interrogation by Peruvian police — and we weren’t alone.

The word was “allegedly,” a somewhat technical, cumbersome term.

Who really ever utters “allegedly” in everyday conversation?  That is why so many editors deplore its use in news stories. Perhaps that could explain why it was absent from much of the mainstream media’s breaking coverage of the Van der Sloot case.

But unlike other abused and misused words in the journalistic lexicon, like “amid” and “mishap,” the judicious application of “allegedly” in news stories is vital. Read more…

Where else besides Machu Picchu should Peru enlist the help of stars like Susan Sarandon?

By Rick Vecchio

Susan Sarandon added a big dose of Hollywood sparkle last week to the reopening ceremony of Peru’s crown jewel, Machu Picchu. Peru would be well served to apply such Tinsel Town treatment  to its other historic attractions.

Against the iconic backdrop of Inca Pachacuti’s 15th century citadel, the Academy Award winning actress posed with Andean children in traditional dress. The Huayna Picchu peek loomed in the distance. The photo-op was a unmitigated success, announcing to the world that Peru’s most popular tourist attraction was again open for business, two months after torrential rains and landslides wiped out train access to the mountaintop shrine.

A battalion of reporters and paparazzi managed to stay mostly on message, asking Sarandon repeatedly what she thought of Machu Picchu — as opposed to probing personal questions about her recent separation from Tim Robbins.

“I had no idea there were so many journalists at Machu Picchu,” joked Sarandon, who was flanked by a U.S. Embassy bodyguard and Peruvian Tourism Minister Martín Pérez. “Oh, (this is) just for me? I though it was like this all the time. So I guess that means maybe I’ll have to see Machu Picchu when you all go and then I’ll have a better idea of what it’s like.”

Inviting Sarandon was a brilliant how-to in “top-down promotion” for Peru’s tourism industry, wrote newspaper columnist Juan Paredes Castro in Sunday’s El Comercio. He posed the question: “How many Susan Sarandons does Peru need?” Read more…

Peruvian Times complaint to Agencia Andina

UPDATE to original post: Agencia Andina has added links on its posts back to our original stories. Peruvian Times appreciates the corrective action.

Lima, March 31, 2010

Laura Vásquez
English Website Editor
Andina Agencia Peruana de Noticias

Dear Ms. Vásquez,

Once again Agencia Andina’s English Website has blatantly plagiarized a Peruvian Times article for use on its English language news page. Read more…

La Primera Op-Ed: Obama, global warming and the world war against drugs

Editorial column from Monday’s La Primera

By Roger Rumrill (Director of the Center for Indigenous Cultures of Peru)

Although the 10-point advantage over Republican John McCain’s has shortened in the past several days, polls in the United States and the rest of the world show Barack Obama as the winner of tomorrow’s presidential elections, unless one of those unforeseen events happen that sometimes change the course of history.

Politically and ideologically centrist, most of Obama’s proposals with regard to the economy, taxes, health services and education, do not differ much from the policies of previous governments. His plan for universal social care is almost identical to that of Harry S. Truman (1945-1953).

However, the great difference lies in his proposal on climate change, ecology and energy independence. This difference is fundamental in view of the fact that the belief in an inexhaustible planet with an eternal capacity to create wealth has come to an end. Because, as Oswaldo de Rivero says, we have to “replace the mythology of economic growth with the scientific data of planetary plunder.”

This is what makes President Alan Garcia’s address at the closing of the 46th Annual Executives Conference (CADE) sound pathetic, contradicting the world by pontificating that “next year we shall have spectacular growth figures” and that “Peru is in a privileged position to be the country of refuge for production and the world’s capital,” when the environmental cost of this growth, in a primary-export economy, is already taking its toll, according to the United Nations, in 8.2 billion soles per year, 3.9 per cent of the GDP, due to the lax environmental laws and the State’s inability to ensure that the laws are obeyed.

This is why the great issues of today’s economic crisis — which, according to Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize 2008, requires a counter-reform that examines the entire architecture of liberalism and a return to the State’s role as regulator and promoter —  are precisely those of climate change with regard to water supply, energy and food production.

It is possible that with Obama in the White House, the United States may finally sign the Kyoto Protocol, and that the lost “world war on drugs” undergo a change in strategy.

The signing of the Kyoto Protocol and an environmental policy directed by Al Gore, and the change of anti-drug policies that currently have an unequivocal military slant, could be two changes that would have a predictable impact worldwide, including in Peru.

Peru.21 Op-Ed: A black man in the White House, the historic significance of triumph for Barack Obama

Editorial from today’s Peru.21 newspaper:

By Augusto Álvarez Rodrich (Director of Peru.21)

If the poll projections are not mistaken, a historic event should be realized tonight for the cause of fundamental rights of humanity: The arrival for the first time to the U.S. Presidency of a person of the black race to command the destiny of a country where established racism has solid, deep roots.

It is so much so, that the only explanation for Barack Obama not achieving an electoral triumph tonight in spite of the polls would be the existence of a hidden vote, not identified by the opinion surveys, of voters who prefer to hide their intentions at the voting booth in order to rule out the possibility of a black man reaching the White House.

As El Comercio’s correspondent in the United States, Miguel Vivanco, reminds us, this is what happend to Tom Bradley — a black man — when he lost the gobernatorial election for California, in spite of all the polls assuring his triumph. What was demonstrated after the election is that many white voters lied to pollsters, and that in the end they opted to vote for a rival candidate in order to prevent a black from winning the contest. But this occurred in 1982, more than a quarter century ago.

These racist tendencies most likely have waned since then to the point where it is not an obstacle today for Obama to become the first black president in the history of the United States.

This will not only be a historic event for a country that only four decades ago confronted

This will not only be a historical event for a country that barely four decades ago confronted movements to allow black people the right to carry out such simple daily tasks as traveling on a bus in the same seats as white people, use the same bathrooms as white people, or allowing black children to be educated in the same schools as white children.

The message of the probable electoral triumph of Obama is not only for the United States.  Also, it will be of great utility for so many areas of the world where racism is still sadly a stain in need of eradication. For example, in some European soccer stadiums, and, so as to not stray too far from home, in some recreational spots in Peru.

El Comercio Op-Ed: Hoping for Obama

Excerpted editorial from Monday’s El Comercio newspaper:
By Dr. Enrique Bernales Ballesteros (Doctor of Law, constitutionalist, Executive Director of the Andean Jurists Commission)

If, as millions of people hope, Barack Obama is elected President of the United States, his election will imply change of worldwide dimensions.

It will be the first time a man of the black race assumes the presidency of the world’s top power. This advance against racial discrimination will signify a giant step in favor of free democracy and equality for all.

From a human rights perspective and a deep identification with the principle of non-discrimination, it will mean a stimulus for humanity, particularly for a race that historically has been excluded, in spite of the preamble principles expressed in the Declaration of Independence. Read more…

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